If all you have at the moment are vast knowledge and experience in the field of health, wellness or weight loss and an immense desire to share all that with those who need advice and support, you are off to a good start.

However, a lack of programming knowledge can hinder your efforts, because it is difficult to set up a great blog if you have little to none blogging and programming experience. This is where we step in, to tell you more about what you need for a good start.

This article is going to deal primarily with the free versions of almost everything, because if you are beginning to invest effort into a hobby, it is good to use the free options first, until you are certain whether or not investing into it would pay off.

The only money you necessarily need to invest is a paid domain and hosting, simply because the free versions of these give you too few options, and it is more difficult to start developing your hobby into a business from a free hosting and domain.

What you need to do first is to install WordPress on your hosting. Downloading WP is free and the installation instructions are given on the WP website. After this is done, what you need to do next is to choose a good free theme for your health and wellness website.

Free WordPress Health, Wellness and Weight Loss Themes

Basically, if you are choosing a free WordPress theme, you are not going to get anything much, but it will be enough to start with. All the themes we have chosen share the basic functionalities, the difference being in the design and the appeal of the theme.

The basic functionalities comprise 2 columns, widgets which can be dragged and dropped into predefined widget areas, featured post image, banner ads, latest WordPress version compatibility, major browsers compatibility and Gravatar use in comments. However, the design itself can sometimes make a major difference.

The color itself gives an impression of lightness and cleanliness, which is very important today when many designs are based on heavy nuances of black and grey. When we exercise, lose weight, or when we are about to start living a healthier lifestyle, we would definitely prefer tips from a soothing website, if the information itself carries weight and is significant.

The second great thing is that the widgets for recent posts, comments and tags on the right are mutually interchangeable, taking up less space and staying above the fold, while at the same time providing a good amount of information.

Stylish slider can be customized easily, or hidden from certain parts of the website, depending on the means you want to use for drawing the readers’ attention. Another convenience here is the existence of six different share buttons for the entire website.

This theme makes everything flow smoothly, and I would recommend it especially for weight loss blogs.

This theme is most of all salient. It doesn’t offer sliders, and it follows the form of a simple blog, but the details are bound to draw the reader’s attention. This theme is screaming: “Look at me! I can tell you everything you need to know about a healthy lifestyle!”Unlike most of the weight loss themes, this theme resembles a collage. It is especially good for websites with healthy diet tips and healthy food information.

The health case theme offers a great layout for health related blogs and websites. Everything is simple and clear cut, and there is space for widgets on both sides if the text, with a wide array of widgets to choose from.

Again, there is a really nice slider, but this time it is not the only means of drawing attention, since the categories are immediately visible when you open the website, and there is also a widget which makes recent posts and comments interchangeable.

Here we have yet another classic looking theme with some great details and both left and right widget areas. Again, this is something I would recommend for websites which offer healthy diet tips. The slider promoting featured posts is a great way to highlight the main topic of your blog.

This theme is slightly different, because aside from a lovely design, a video is inserted into the header of the homepage, and there is an additional image slider below, which is appealing to those members of the audience who are visual types and I really like that.

This theme is perfect for weight loss blogs, since the homepage image is a strong first indicator of the topic of the blog. There are standard Facebook, Twitter and RSS buttons.

Useful Free Plugins

Now, there is no certain way of predicting exactly which plugins you will need during your work. But there are some which are essential for your blog and your nerves. My top four plugins to use when starting a blog are:

This plugin is a real salvation from comment spam. I installed it immediately when I started one of my blogs, but with many obligations I had, I forgot to activate it, and that was a big mistake. Soon after, my inbox was flooded by spam comments of all sorts, and then I immediately activated this plugin. It is really good at telling spam from real comments, and stopping spam from ever reaching you.

This is my favorite WordPress SEO plugin, because nearly everyone can use it. If you are not proficient enough in SEO just ask someone to set the parameters for you, or you can try to figure out how stuff work from the plugin documentation on your own. If you know what you are doing, this plugin is the perfect solution because of all the options it offers.

This is a great, easy to use contact form which will make you more available to your readers. No additional comments on my side are needed, because it can be set up quickly and it is efficient, and that is all the information you really need.

I used this plugin on one of my blogs so that my readers could share the stuff I write about easily, and it was fairly easy to find and configure, so now I recommend it to everyone, especially to the beginner bloggers.

Tips for getting the message across

When you are just beginning to blog, it is difficult to get lots of readers, simply because Google itself needs some time to evaluate and rank your blog.

There are some essential tips you should follow to get the most out of your blog, so don’t start losing hope if your blog doesn’t appear on the first page of the SERPs in a week, but focus on doing what is necessary in order to build a permanent reputation and authority.

For the promotion of your blog you can use your personal profiles, where you should moderately share and discuss your posts. The blog promotion focus should be on the business pages you should create for your blog.

Engage with your audience and choose interesting topics to get them engaged with what you write, because this is the way you get both new readers and positive social media signals.

Post regularly.

Both your readers and Google appreciate the regularity of your posts. Aside from this, it is important to post content which is fresh often enough in order for everyone to realize your blog is a valuable source of applicable information.

Be careful who you link to.

Don’t accept just any link exchange offers. If you link to a bunch of worthless websites it is not going to bring you anything good. Link to great resources and interesting websites which will enhance your readers’ experience and your website will grow in popularity both with your readers and with Google.

Enjoy

Blogging can bring you undreamt-of results if you love and enjoy what you blog about and the blogging itself. You need to be prepared to invest your knowledge, experience, enthusiasm and time into your blog if you want everyone to know about it. So get down to work and make yourself proud!

Author Bio:
As a blogger who likes to keep in shape, Ivan Dimitrijevic has often combined his blogging experience and his love of dieting and fitness to write about topics like weight loss programs and meal delivery services. He has had articles published on topics including social media marketing, blogging tips, Weight Watchers Diet Program Reviews and cutting weight while training. He likes to write occasionally for health/wellness related blogs like Weight Loss Triumph. Ivan Dimitrijevic is married, with a 4 year old daughter and enjoys preparing delicious and healthy meals for his family.

All these themes are a little too busy for my tastes, but hey they’re free right? I run several health-related WordPress sites and I’m a fan of using YooThemes, which can really be customized to fit any kind of topic. However, they do come at a premium.

Hi Gera
some great info here i wish i had read it a couple of days ago i have just been trying to set a site up. What a huge learning curve. Everything is new and takes ten times longer than expected. Will keep hold of this post though to have a refer back to as i have a play to get my site right over the next few days.

There’s some great SEO advice in this article, as well as the free WordPress themes. Making sure you only make links to relevant, high quality sites and blogs will help you gain the traffic you want. Also, developing a niche, like weight loss, or health can boost your reputation and authority on the subject.